As a man, it seems to me that the knee jerk reaction of "oh yeah, several women" will be quickly followed by the many hassles of trying to maintain harmony.

American men seem to forget that polygamy occurs in a closed system where the total number of marriage-aged women is more or less conserved.

When one Afghan man takes four wives, there are three Afghan men left over who don't have any chance of getting married at all.

Which, in Afghan society, means being sentenced to celibacy -- and poverty -- for life.

This is actually a very big issue for young, poor Afghan men.

This is part of how the Taliban recruited impoverished young men -- by promising to find them wives.

The north of the country would be slightly to the left of Massachusetts and the south of the country would be far, far to the right of Alabama.

This is why they haven't been able to maintain a strong central government in Kabul for more than a few years at a time.

We certainly have *influenced* their treatment of women.

We've helped guarantee security for the liberal modernist Afghans in the north of the country who by and large support women's rights.

We haven't converted all of the tribalists in the south to modern ways and we might never convert all of them 100%.

That fact does not mean that the war has been a failure.

So here's the question for world police feminists: If invading another country isn't enough to influence its treatment of women, what is?

Patience, hope, encouragement, and economic development.

We're not just trying to influence their treatment of women.

We're also trying to help the country attain enough rule of law so that they can have a functioning economy and they can stop functioning as a training ground for global terrorism.

We just have to learn to be patient, because impatience has always been the quickest route to disaster in Afghanistan for everyone who has tried to reform the country.

Broadsheet is impatient and engages frequently in a kind of "women's rights abuses" porn.

There are lots of chances for this in Afghanistan and this tendency to engage in "women's rights abuses" porn has driven reformers to bite off more than they could chew.

We have to resist this tendency and see this as a long term struggle.

The people who saw this as a short term struggle driven from the top down by Kabul helped create the chaos we're dealing with now.

"The Tragedy of Afghanistan" by Raja Anwar.

During the 1970s, more than 50% of the students at Kabul University were women.

How did they get from there to the Taliban?

It's important for feminists who care about Afghanistan to understand exactly what happened to Afghan feminism in the 1970s.

Anwar's book is the only book that deals with that time period in detail.

Here's the problem: Karzai is only powerful as long as there IS a government in Kabul.

It's not realistic to have big expectations of Karzai given the fact that the very idea of central government in Afghanistan could still be described as "hanging by a thread."

I don't think they've gotten to that point yet where the central government in Kabul has enough power to be able tell fundamentalists to do things that fundamentalists do not want to do.

They still don't even have a functioning police force. So you could write all the women-friendly laws you wanted and even IF you get them passed into law, good luck trying to enforce them.

It's sick and sad but those are the limitations that feminists have to learn to understand and work within.

These things we all take for granted like laws, police, central government -- these ideas are relatively new to Afghanistan and quite a bit of the population, the demographic that lives by traditional tribal law, doesn't even accept them yet.

Feminists are going to have to be patient and wait until Afghanistan evolves a bit more as a country before any leader is able to make the equal rights part of the constitution real in practice, not just in principle.

"A Decade After Prohibition, a Hempen Future"

The year is 2020, and Seattle, Washington is experiencing a construction boom. America has mostly rebounded from the economic downturn of the first decade of the century. Old, failed policies of prohibition did more damage than good to society, while ignoring potential renewable resources and undermining respect for the rule of law. Eleven years after the decriminalization, taxation, and regulation of cannabis and hemp, America has experienced nearly a decade of new found freedoms.

Hempfest in Seattle is where you'll find the surviving echoes of Woodstock.

Woodstock felt like an continuation of the assertive nonviolence of the civil rights movement.

It felt like there was an alternative to the culture of the stoic post-traumatic 1950s alcoholics who kowtowed to authority in public while unleashing their drunken rage at home and calling it normal masculinity.

The civil rights movement and Woodstock and the hippie movement presented alternatives to the twin cultures of alcohol and war that ruled America at the time.

Beacons of hope that still shine today.